A hive will swarm when everything in their hive is perfect -- plenty of honey, baby bee eggs laid, pollen ready to feed the larvae, and they've left a few new queens in eggs to hatch so there will be a bee-mama ready to start laying more bee eggs. The old hive leaves everything ready for the new hive to grow strong. Really, it's remarkably generous of them, isn't it?

When the hive swarms, about 2/3 of the bees and the old queen leave but before they do, each bee gorges herself on honey so she'll have enough food in her to last the few days it may take to find a new home. A bee in a swarm is full of honey (drunk on honey is what we call it) and very peaceful.

Swarming bees are very unlikely to sting anyone, they're at their very gentlest, because they 

1) have no home to protect, and 

2) are too drunk on honey to feel worried. 

We've collected swarms  by lifting clusters up with our bare hands. Sadly they are also at their most vulnerable and many get picked off by birds in air or are harmed by humans who think they are dangerous. 

Here's what a swarm looks like hanging in a tree. They're patiently waiting for the scouts to find them a home.

Last year I saw a 12 year old boy on the side of a road spraying a swarm in a bush with poison to kill them. There was no reason for this. The bees were no danger to anyone where they were, off on the side of a field. If he'd left them alone, they would have moved on as soon as they found a new home. Instead he killed them, a terrible loss to us all.

When the swarm is ready they take off from the hive and find a tree or bush where they can hang in a cluster. As soon as they're settled the scout bees take off and look for a new home for them. Each time a scout returns to the swarm with a suggestion, she brings other scout bees with her to see what she thinks might make a fine new home. Good places are anywhere dry and protected, like in an old hollowed out tree or something that resembles that.

A swarm may sit in its temporary location for 20 minutes or they may be there for up to three days (though that's more unusual). In the meantime the scouts are busy looking until they do. Once the scouts decide on a good location, news of the new home spreads instantly -- the swarm lifts as one and flies to it. 

If a hive doesn't find a new home within that time, they are in great danger because they are subject to weather, predators or scared humans finding them and killing them.

The more people who know what a swarm is doing -- and that a SWARM IS NOT INTERESTED IN HARMING ANYONE -- the better. The bees are, as most everyone knows, having a very difficult time right now and the salvation of the bees lies in saving these wild swarms so they can grow stronger.

If someone sees a swarm here's what to do:

1. Leave it alone. The scouts will find a home soon enough and likely within a few hours the whole swarm will be gone.

2. Call your neighbors to come see this ever-more-rare occurence. Some worry that in just a few years, bees may die off and there will be no more swarms.

3. If the swarm needs to be moved, call a local beekeeping group (look up the county extension service, they'll know who they are) and someone will come get them. I do this all the time in southwest Washington and the greater Portland Oregon area. (photo: Joseph helping catch the bees i'm taking off the branch.)

4. Please do NOT harm the bees.  I tell people to stay ten feet away and just watch. Or stand further away and use binoculars. It's an amazing sight. If the hive is in any danger from people it's a good idea to cordon off the area until they move off to their new home.

5. Keep anyone who wants to bother the bees away from them. I've rescued bees that have been sprayed or dowsed with water which did nothing except make the bees susceptible to weather.  There's just no reason for that.

We originally come from New England where snow falls from October to April and though we don't miss blizzards one bit, when we had a few inches of a snowstorm all those years ago, we did wish we had a good sled on hand.

That toboggan sat unused for all those years until just before Christmas when an arctic wind visited and over a week's time dumped about ten inches on us. As you can see the farm looked peaceful and beautiful. What you don't see is how we ran around the day before the storm -- when it was still a balmy 54 degrees -- covering all our garden beds with row covers, tarps and cold frame boxes.

It got so cold last week that much of our winter garden gave up and decided to become mulching material for spring. Nonetheless some hardy plants survived:  brussel sprouts, kale, red cabbage and the parsley that lives in the coldframe. Also everything underground did just fine, all the potatoes, sunchokes and even a few onions. It amazes me how some plants, even in freezing cold temperatures just say, "Brrr...," then shake the ice off their leaves in the next melt and continue growing. Isn't nature wonderful?

Our hens completely refused to set one bony foot on snow. They stayed inside the coop or wandered out under the roofed area to eat from their feeders but nary a chicken track appeared in the snow.

  Joseph walking up to the chicken coop with Remy.

We've been keeping our cows in our neighbors' pasture just up the hill. Normally we milk our cow in an outside stanchion all winter. Hardy souls that we are, if it's raining we wear a rain hat. But our neighbor's barn has inside stanchions and I have to tell you, in the freezing cold snap, I sure was happy to be inside and milking. Not that it was warm by any means, but we at least were out of the wind and snow flurries.

When I milk our cow, no matter how cold the air is, if my fingers are on her warm udder and my head is resting on her furry side as she eats hay, I feel warm. Soon as I stop, even with long underwear on, the air immediately feels bone chillingly cold again. 

Normally we make the seven minute walk up to the barn with our hot water jugs twice each day to feed and milk. If it's a dark and rainy night, however, we're not above driving the car up to stay dry. But snow isn't the same as rain and who wants to drive uphill in snow and risk getting stuck? 

Joseph finally had an opportunity to put that dusty toboggan to work. He suggested it would be a good way to carry our heavy hot water jugs up there so we bundled the bottles in a cloth bag and tied them on. Off we trundled with the toboggan dragging behind us. It was a lot easier to walk through the deep and icy snow with the toboggan carrying the heavy bottles.

But the best part was after we finished our cow care tasks and walked out of the barn into the fresh snow drifts. Joseph sat down in front so he could steer and with one milk jug under each arm I snuggled myself behind him. Speedily we sailed down the hill, coasted at a fair clip across the straightaway and then picked up speed as we yelled and hollered across our field, past the greenhouse and sledded down the path to home.

A few nights later the rain returned and overnight we went back to winter drizzle and green grass. Tomorrow's supposed to be 50-something and sunny so I'm thinking it will be a good day to get started on pruning the fruit trees. Hope you're staying warm this winter.

Jacqueilne & Joseph

Here's a look at the event if you didn't get a chance to see it when we did this with summer apples in August. (Our friend Lisa Fenderson made this video and she did a great job on it.)

Lisa's video of Apple Day

Our farm is east of Battle Ground in the sleepy village of Venersborg in the Cascade foothills. We have three commercial buildings in our town: a tiny general store, the two room church and the one-room schoolhouse that's on the national & Washington Historic Registers.  The 1912 schoolhouse is the oldest continuously operating community building in Washington. For the past two years I've been president of the local community club. Once I didn't show up for a meeting and -- surprise-surprise -- I got a phone call telling me I was the new prez. That's how it works here. 

The median age of our members is, I'd guess, about 78. I think there are three of us who are under 60. I may be exaggerating a little but not much. (In case any of our members are reading this, of course there's not a one of them who looks her age. Country living can be either marvelously kind or sunburntly unforgiving and she's been kind to our group.)

This little building is heated with a hundred year old giant woodstove and we use outhouses when nature calls. Which brings me to why I'm writing this.

These ladies are getting on in years and the outhouse is a problem for many of them. You'd know what I mean if you, as I have, handed an 83 year old lady a flashlight so she could take her walker and trundle up the path in the woods in the rain in February to use the loo. Quite a few of them say they can't come to the meetings anymore because they can't easily use the outhouse. Or, worse, they don't drink anything for half the day before they come so they won't have to use the outhouse which certainly isn't healthy.

They've wanted a bathroom in the building since probably before I was born. I am determined this year to get a bathroom (small sink, low flow flush toilet, that's it) put in.

Over the past ten years these ladies have raised a few hundred dollars each year raffling off handmade quilts and afghans, hosting baked goods auctions, running a tiny annual yard sale, ice cream socials and craft days. That money took care of upkeep on the little building and the rest went into savings.

They let boy scouts, the cemetery commission and local people have meetings and get-togethers here for no charge, although many folks do make a small donation. The money raised was enough to get the permits, perc pits dug and a simple septic system designed. At this rate they need to do this for another dozen years and I wonder how many of them will be around then.

Right now we have donations of materials and labor from local folks to build the bathroom. We need about $6000 more to pay the septic installer and a few other bills and we should be able to get the job finished. Up until now all our events have been local but with the apple event, we're reaching outside of town for support.

On Saturday Oct. 18 from 11-4 our farm is co-hosting an heirloom apple tasting at the schoolhouse to raise funds toward the bathroom. We'll have 200 different kinds of apples to taste, luscious pies to eat, unsprayed apples to buy. Choose which apples sing to your taste buds and we'll make trees of those types to plant in your yard. The generous folks from the Home Orchard Society will be on hand to help identify apples and, hopefully, to find some rare ones among what gets brought in. Last year we learned one of our old farm trees was so rare it was thought to be extinct and now is rediscovered!

First I want to invite you to come out to the schoolhouse for our apple event. Bring friends. Eat pie. Munch on red-fleshed apples or purple skinned ones or apples that taste like pineapple. We'll have kinds you can't even imagine.

Below left, Kandil Sinap. Right, Duchess of Oldenburg (from the 1600s)

On left, the red-fleshed Russian Crab (a BIG apple). Right, the sweet Swedish Make.

While the ladies have volunteered to help out, I think the energy required may plumb tucker them out so I'm also putting out a call for some helpers.

Admission is $5, kids are $3 (under 6 free) and volunteers can eat as many apples as they like. I'm not going to let the ladies price the cookies this time though. At our tag sale in September they each baked a few dozen cookies and then priced them a quarter each because they were so concerned that someone might not be able to afford one. I would have charged a dollar for the whompin' handful of still warm made-from-scratch brownie and given a free one to anyone who looked quarter-challenged and hungry. I keep reminding them that this is a fundraiser and it's okay to charge a few dollars for a slice of homebaked apple pie like the one our neighbors Scott and Brenda (and son Kyle) are making here ...

or the pies our sweet farmgirl helpers from Dee Creek made. 

If you want to help slice and handout apples you're welcome to pitch in. You'll learn all kinds of things about heirloom apples, or you can slice pie, pour cider, sell buckets of fresh apples or take tree orders. It all helps. If you want to volunteer, give us a call 360-687-8384.

If you'd like to munch 200 apples and contribute a few dollars to the town's flush fund, we're glad to have you! The schoolhouse is located at

24317 N.E. 209th St. in Battle Ground, WA, a pleasant country drive about a half hour north of Portland, OR.

Visit our farm's website -- read more stories and see pictures!

warmly,

Jacqueline & Joseph

Friendly Haven Rise Farm

"Where Spirit and Nature Meet"

* FARM ANIMALS

Let's start with the TURKEYS ...

Last year we again raised a dozen heirloom turkeys, which shows we're no smarter than the turkeys. They're a handful and we decided after two years in a row with them that we'd raise them every OTHER year. Sweet as they are personality wise, they're really not that bright. One out of three evenings they'd forget where the coop was. If we weren't home at dusk we'd have to climb trees to get them down in the dark. Or, since it was fall and the start of our rainy season, we climbed trees in the DARK and in the RAIN. Now really, how dumb are we?

Joseph would hold the ladder steady while I climbed up into the tree with a flashlight to shake a turkey down, then Joseph would run to catch the 20 lb. pile of wet fluff and feather that fell out of the branches and carry him AROUND THE CORNER OF THE BUILDING and put him in the coop. I'm not kidding. Around the corner.

When we'd see them lost as dusk neared, we'd go down to help them find the coop. First you should know, a turkey will follow you anywhere. It must be a feature in their little brains that says if nobody else can figure out how to lead, then follow the one that does. That would be one of us.

So we'd go inside their pen in the apple orchard and call them. Our turkeys had a two word vocabulary. If something good was happening, they'd trill three ascending notes, beep-beep-beep. If we beeped, they followed.

If they felt lost or confused (I can't tell you how many times a day THAT happened), they'd do three descendiing notes, boop-boop-boop. Try whining that as sadly as you possibly can. Like on the verge of tears. 

Even if we were in the house we could hear that mournful little boop-boop-boop and we'd always go out to see.

 And what we found was always sad. 

To protect our small orchard trees from deer and bunnies in winter, we put a circle of wire fencing around the trees about two feet out from the trunk. Since it wasn't winter and the trees weren't in danger, we had opened the wire cages so we could prune or apply compost. 

More than once we'd hear the sad boop and go down to their pen and see that one or more of the turkeys had managed to get inside the OPEN cage near the tree and couldn't figure out how to get out. They would keep walking forward and bumping into the wire as they tried to rejoin the flock on the other side of the fence. Stuck. Could not figure out that all they had to do to escape was TURN AROUND AND WALK OUT THE OPEN SIDE OF THE FENCE.

Excuse my caps on these letters but I must have tried to explain this to the turkeys forty times at least. I'd even go in myself and show them. Bump up against the fence, no go. Turn around and walk out in ANY direction behind you and you're free.

I swear if you ever wanted to hunt a domestic turkey, all you'd have to do is put up one short wall of a fence, no sides, no corners, and just wait for one to get stuck up against it. Done. Thanksgiving dinner on the table.

So every third night we'd go down at dusk in answer to the chorus of nearly weepy boops and call the turkeys to fall in behiind us as we walked twenty feet south, took a right and ... the whole flock would suddenly leap into a run-fly, beeping all the way. We've found our way home! Here it is!

So that's why we decided to take a year off and raise them every other year and this isn't one of them.

To give credit to Ben Franklin who wanted the wild turkey to be our national emblem, I've heard that wild turkeys are really smart. Ours were not. We raised a few commercial breeds (a gift from a friend) the first year, then tried four different breeds of heirloom turkeys the second year. Hardly a cipher's worth of difference smarts-wise. 

COWS

Our Jersey-Swiss cow, Miss Amelia, calved in January presenting us with an adorable half-Angus boy, Possum. We learned how to milk her by watching a video on YouTube of an old Slavic woman doing it.

We just did what she did and it worked. We milked every day up until a few weeks ago when she went dry. Now she's pregnant and we're waiting for the next calf to start over again. In May we also added two Simmenthals: Delilah is a big black monolith who's due to calve in the next week or two; and Maurice ("the gangster of love"), her nephew, is our beef cow this year. I've watched him in the orchard and I bet he can eat his weight in apples in a day. With Amelia's delicious creamy milk we made a lot of cheese, butter and ice cream this year.

HENS

Our chickens had the entire farm to range on last year but this spring they were monsters in my flower gardens so we caged them into four big half-acre pens that we rotate them through. They don't seem to have noticed they're behind a fence. 

New additions are six chicks, some born this week. Nothing's cuter than a baby chick. We can easily spend a half hour cooing and ahing over them which we do at least three times a day.

BEES 

We've got a lot of bees in the non-commercial top bar hives (TBH) we made. TBHs are more bee-centric than production oriented. I don't do a big honey production although we always get some. They're more for pollination and simply because I love bees. They give me extra reason to grow flowers, herbs and clover and to let the weeds go to flower and then seed without feeling I should have pulled them up when they were small.

GARDENS and ORCHARDS

You'd laugh if you saw the gardens right now. Because of the joyful activity of the bees, I let most everything go to bloom rather than pulling it out once the vegetables go by. We have plenty of five foot tall blue flowering lettuces and taller-than-me purple flowered radishes and truly enormous yellow mustards. The beds are full of red and white clovers and purple vetch. When I go to pull something out, I look on top and if there are a few bees there I let it go longer. It makes seed saving easier anyway.

Our tomatoes and basil are delicious. The beans have climbed higher than our corn already but the corn is short so that wasn't hard. Not sure yet how to grow tall corn but even on short stalks we get ears. Maybe next year we'll figure that out. 

Beds have chard, onions, lettuce, cabbage, eggplant, blueberries, currants, jerusalem artichokes, potatoes, sunflowers, lavender, rosemary, thyme, mints and celery. And anything else that volunteers like borage and tomatillos.

We just hayed eight acres of our neighbor's field where we're pasturing the cows so we ought to have enough to get through winter without buying more. The cost difference is immense. Non-organic hay is about $6 bale, organic much higher. When we hay by ourselves -- despite the challenge of hot, sweaty, hard labor -- a bale is about 15 cents direct cost. Don't remind me of the cost of the mortgage for the land because when I look at 15 cents, it sounds like a win.

Orchards are growing. We've got about 150 fruit and nut trees so far, many still young. Our old timer trees are laden with fruit. Again, a banner year for apples. Grapes still green, many bunches. Just planted a dozen more varieties of seedless grapes so we can add raisin-making to our fall chores. 

HOW DO WE DO IT?

We earn our income teaching garden, farm and animal-related classes here. Take a look at our class schedule.

Early  Fall 2008 Classes

We also host farm volunteers through the year and they are a big help. We had three helpers this summer, Kat from New York, Jean-Paul from Italy and Andrea from Switzerland. Great helpers!

Everything else we do (like writing this blog) happens alongside the farm chores. I just finished two hours of shoveling in a new compost pile while Joseph installed pipes to hook up a bathtub in the cottage. Our days are always full. Hard work. Love it.

Our volunteers live on the farm with us and help out in exchange for room/board and learning farm skills. Tasks vary. Obviously gardening and animal care is a big part but also carpentry, irrigation, dismantling and rebuilding outbuildings, stonewalls, laying brick paths, fencing, haying ... the list goes on.

We did a few farmers markets this year and realized we're not really cut out for that. It's a tremendous amount of work and doesn't always pencil out as profitable. Makes me admire even more the farmers we see week after week hitting all the markets around. I grow stuff yet, for the same reason I overtip waitresses, I still buy whatever I can from local farmers because I know how hard a job it is. 

So that's what we're up to right now. Our days are full, animals are thriving, apple trees are so lush we had to put ladders under the branches to hold the branches up. We made our first cider a few days ago and already have a few gallons in the freezers. If you come by we'll break out a bottle. 

Life is good. Be well.    

warmly,

Jacqueline

Friendly Haven Rise Farm

www.FriendlyHaven.com